London evening newspapers bannerline the Apollo 13 troubles outlining the battle to bring the astronauts and their crippled spaceship back to Earth from a quarter million miles away. London, April 14, 1970. (AP Photo/Eddie Worth))

The other day when I posted one of my columns to Facebook — hey, they don’t throw themselves into the mammoth moneymaking maw, given over gratis by wimpy old-school journalism to the social-media billionaires who have eaten our lunch — a Bay Area friend complained in the FB comments section: “Your paper has put up a pay wall, and I can’t read this!”

I didn’t want to get into the economic weeds with him. All I wrote in reply was: “Baby needs new shoes.” (Baby may be 29 and married, living in New England, but I could use some new kicks myself.) He’s an artist and an architect, not a toiler in the scorched-earth journalism vineyards.

We’re hungrier than ever for information, which some idiot a few decades ago said wants to be free. Bad information is consequently everywhere. Good information is very expensive. But though we want the water, we’d just as soon do without the rain. Thus, the newspaper “industry,” run these days out of cottages.

Hold the phone. Before I get on my old-guy journo soapbox, did I ever tell you my one good Mark Zuckerberg story? A friend of mine — she happens to be a former newspaper reporter — lives around the corner from Zuck in Palo Alto. Just a few doors away. Not that she knows him; it’s not like he’s out front mowing the lawn on Saturdays. But when he and his wife had a baby, she sent a gift. Neighborly thing to do. It came back in the U.S. mail: “Return to sender.” So she marched it over to one of the security guards hiding in Hondas on the streets around the compound. Handed it to him, miffed. She never heard back from the happy couple.

I suppose you could say that newspapers had their rude billionaire days. William Randolph Hearst made a nice castle out of the keyboard-banging of ink-stained wretches. I once went to a party at the Chandlers’ mid-century modern San Marino mansion, and Otis’s family room was lined with trophy lions’ heads bagged on African safaris. Now, no one becomes a billionaire, newspapering. You buy one out of pity because you already are a billionaire.

You saw the other day where the parent company of the Sacramento Bee, one of the nation’s great newspapers, filed for bankruptcy. Indeed, the headline over a piece in the current New York Review of Books by Nicholas Lemann, a professor at the Columbia University J-school, is: “Can Journalism Be Saved?”

He duly notes that it was always thus. After quoting an essay from 1904 lamenting a previous golden age of print — “the press of the country, with only once exception that I can now recall, was clean, dignified and sober minded” — Lemann writes: “Journalists are eternally nostalgic, and alarmed at how things are now.”

But even paranoids have enemies, and the enemies of a free press who will make it tough for privately owned American newspapers to make it through this decade are two-fold: your many neighbors who have decided they don’t need to pay to read this paper, and the splitting off of most advertising dollars to the social-media companies that can aggressively target consumers, who have willingly turned over everything in their lives to Silicon Valley.

“Google’s and Facebook’s business, as they defined it,” Lemann writes, “was providing free access to whatever information a user might want — not to distinguish between what was true and what wasn’t, or between news and opinion, or to try to expose users to a variety of views instead of reinforcing what people already thought. It would have been easy for the two giants to launch news divisions, but why bother?”

Why indeed? We gave it away. And if society stops paying for the privilege, real news will soon enough give up the ghost.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.

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